Re: [MacPerl] Testing for Defined

[Richard Gordon <gordon@mindspring.com>]

On 1/21/99 at 17:44, albrecht@gate.net (Charles Albrecht) wrote:

> Just a note here - Excel is notorious for generating text files with 
> exactly this structure (never a line ending on the last line). I don't 
> know whether this has been cleaned up in recent releases, but I've 
> grown to inherently distrust text files that have been mussed with 
> in Excel.

That's interesting and may (or may not) have something to do with another
Excel peculiarity when it opens files that Microsoft seemed to think was a
feature. Basically, when you try to open a text, dbf, whatever, file with
Excel that contains too many records (was 16000+, now maybe 65000 as I
understand it), it would churn along fine until it hit the limit, then put
up a dialog telling you that it was in over its head. So far, so good, but
the dialog would disappear after a minute or so and if you happened to be on
the phone or something and missed it, you might reasonably think that the
entire import file had landed successfully as whatever did make it in was
sitting there on screen and looked normal. An eof was set and the file
behaved like any other, but I wonder if this "ability" to handle oversized
files has anything to do with the failure to terminate the last record?

Richard Gordon
Gordon Consulting & Design
Voice: 770-565-8267  Fax: 770-971-6887



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